Ezekia at Hunt Scanlon's Private Equity Recruiting Conference, Chicago
On 29 September 2026, Max Woolger, VP Revenue at Ezekia, was in Chicago for one of the most significant gatherings in private equity talent this year.
Hunt Scanlon Media brought together more than 250 private equity operating partners, chief talent officers, portfolio executives, and executive recruiters at the Hilton in Chicago for their annual PE recruiting conference, "Return on Investment: Creating Value with Talent." The event is run by Hunt Scanlon Media, the leading publication covering the executive search and talent industry in the United States, and it draws the people who are actually making leadership decisions in PE, not just talking about them.
Introducing the Day's Second Session
Max introduced the conference's second speaking session, "Building Leadership Capacity: Scaling Executive Teams Across the Portfolio." The session featured Alice Hurh, Principal and Head of Human Capital at Waud Capital Partners, who shared how her team builds repeatable frameworks for identifying, recruiting, and onboarding executive talent across portfolio companies, and how they work closely with CEOs to assess leadership teams, make targeted upgrades, and align talent strategy with key inflection points in the value creation plan.
The session was moderated by Keith Giarman, Managing Partner of the Global PE Practice at DHR Global.
It is a conversation that sits right at the heart of what PE talent teams are grappling with. Portfolio companies cannot afford to fill leadership gaps reactively. The firms that create consistent value are the ones building leadership infrastructure proactively, before the gaps appear and not after.
Max in Conversation with Hunt Scanlon Media
Beyond the conference floor, Max also sat down with Hunt Scanlon Media ahead of the event to discuss how private equity firms are approaching talent technology. The resulting piece, How Private Equity Firms Are Modernizing Talent Strategy Through Technology, covers the shift from talent as a back-office function to talent as a strategic capability embedded in the dealmaking process.
The themes Max raised will be familiar to anyone working at the intersection of search and private equity. PE firms that have invested in a proper talent CRM are increasingly operating as strategic partners to their investment teams rather than purely transactional recruiters. Deal partners and talent leads are tracking the same senior executives from different angles: a conference relationship here, a succession planning conversation there. The firms that perform consistently are the ones with a single source of truth connecting those threads.
It is worth reading in full if you work in this space.
Why This Matters for Ezekia
Private equity is one of the most demanding environments for talent technology. The requirements are genuinely different from general executive search: off-limits management across the portfolio, deal-team collaboration, pre-acquisition leadership diligence, and succession planning that needs to survive multiple holding periods. General ATS platforms were not built for this, and the gap between what PE talent teams need and what most tools provide is something we hear about constantly.
Ezekia is built for exactly this kind of work, and we work on both sides of the fence. That means in-house PE talent teams building and managing leadership pipelines across their portfolios, and executive search firms that specialise in placing talent into PE-backed companies and their portfolio businesses. The requirements overlap more than people assume, and the platform serves both.
Being invited to speak at a Hunt Scanlon conference and to contribute to their readership on where PE talent technology is heading reflects the conversations we are already having with firms on both sides of that equation.
The Broader Programme
The full day featured sessions on executive diligence in deal processes, the evolution of the talent mandate across the investment lifecycle, talent operations in PE-backed companies, leadership intelligence and how firms are beginning to use data and analytics to sharpen human capital decisions. The room was full of the people responsible for making those decisions, and the quality of conversation reflected that.
If you work in private equity talent or executive search and want to talk about what the right platform infrastructure looks like for your team, get in touch.
Read Max's full interview with Hunt Scanlon Media: How Private Equity Firms Are Modernizing Talent Strategy Through Technology
